Days In The Light Of
by anactoria
Summary: The bombs fall anyway. Series of linked ficlets written for the stagesoflove challenge community on LJ. Probably somewhat slashy.
1. Break

**Author: **Anactoria

**Characters:** Dan, Adrian

**Rating:** PG-13

**Notes: **This is a series of linked ficlets written for the Stages of Love challenge community on Livejournal. Might end up slightly shippy, might not.

* * *

1. Prompt: Dawn

Dan's eyes hurt. He's been staring blankly at the ceiling, trying to will himself to sleep and not having much luck with it. He never does, lately. The night is too hot and the sheets are sticking to his skin, and the murky streetlight creeping through the gaps in the window blind is dull and insistent as a headache.

He's been having a lot of those recently, too. Stress, he guesses. The lack of sleep, and not being able to figure out what he should _do_ now, and not even having anybody he can actually talk to about it.

Rorschach's dead, Hollis is dead, Laurie's gone. Two months now since she left, saying that she just couldn't deal with it any longer, the memories and the failure and the center of the city like some giant cenotaph, except that the people who gave their lives didn't fucking sign up for it, and Dan can't say that he blames her.

(He found a half-empty packet of her cigarettes in the nightstand drawer yesterday, and it didn't bother him, not really. He just sighed, shrugged, and tossed the box into the trash. He's getting over it.)

And the only other person he could speak to-- well.

Dan's gotten past the stage where he curses involuntarily and changes channel every time Adrian's face appears on TV, but now he just finds himself feeling sick and sad instead, which might be worse. He can't even summon up any outrage any more. What's the point?

He sighs, heaves himself out of bed, heads to the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. Yesterday's _Times_ is still lying on the table, front page up. _Russia accuses US of harboring Manhattan._

And that's the kicker. That's what makes him feel hopeless instead of angry, _stupid_ instead of just helpless. Because for a while -- only months ago, and already it's hard to believe -- it actually seemed like Adrian's plan might have worked. Unity. Disarmament talks. International ass-kissing. And then... nothing. Sniping and suspicion. Circumstances sliding back, surely and inexorably, to the way they were.

Adrian called it a practical joke. Dan figures even he didn't know quite how accurate a description that would turn out to be.

And sometimes -- times like this, usually, when he can't sleep and his thoughts turn over and over and he's powerless to stop them -- he does think about speaking to Adrian. Calling him (because, for some reason he doesn't like to look into too deeply, he hasn't scratched the number out of his address book, or torn out the page and thrown it away), or hell, just jumping in Archie and flying over there, banging on Adrian's penthouse window and demanding to know exactly what he plans on doing about this _now_.

He never does. He doesn't have the energy or even the _hope_ for confrontation these days, and he doesn't know what else he could possibly say.

Dan takes a gulp of water, shakes his head. He'll go down to the Nest, he decides. It's cooler there. Maybe he'll be able to relax. The pessimistic part of his brain snorts and tells him there isn't much chance of that, but he goes, anyway.

So at 02:42, Dan's in his basement, sitting in his pyjamas and trying not to think, and he doesn't see anything when the end of days breaks over the horizon like dawn.


	2. Permanent Twilight

2. Prompt: Evening/dusk

* * *

Everything's gone grey.

Dan knows why. Dust from the rubble; smoke and soot from the fires, some of which are still burning. It's likely to remain in the air for months, even years, reducing sunlight and lowering the temperature on the ground. Nuclear winter.

He knows this, but his brain refuses to focus on the facts. Suited up and inside Archie, he ought to be thinking rationally, trying to stay calm, but he just keeps thinking that he feels like a diver in a wreck, cut-off and cold and miles from the living world. Yesterday this was New York, and today it's a horror-movie wasteland, thick with ghosts and nothing left to salvage. All the shapes and angles in the rubble are indistinct, and he keeps expecting some shambling rubber monster to lurch at him out of the murk. And when he reminds himself that this is _real_, it actually happened, he starts feeling like there are cubic tons of water pressing in on him and he is going to implode, and has to force himself to just look straight ahead and carry on, tunnel vision through the permanent twilight.

*

"Dan." Adrian doesn't look up, and neither does the guy whose wrist he's bandaging. Well, practically a kid, really; he's perhaps twenty, and he has dust in his hair and eyes dull with denial or incomprehension, or maybe just exhaustion. One of his legs is already in a cast.

"You have plenty of first-aid experience," Adrian goes on, and his hands don't stop moving. Deft, quick, graceful even in all this noise and confusion. The knuckles of his right hand are scraped red and raw. "You should speak to Doctor Mayer. She's over there." He inclines his head minutely.

His voice doesn't falter or crack, and some little part of Dan that's still clinging on to _before_ guesses that that should make him angry, but mostly he's just glad. He'd like to cling on to the words, sag against their steadiness and just collect his thoughts for a moment, comforted by the fact that some part of the old world still exists, something he knows is still true.

Adrian finishes the bandage, rubs his hands with sterile alcohol, straightens his shirt. He's wearing dress shoes, no tie, but then that could have been discarded somewhere along the way. He looks as though he's been interrupted in the middle of a business meeting.

"Excuse me," Adrian says, and Dan isn't sure whether he's addressing him or the kid, not that it makes much difference. The kid just blinks and goes back to staring blankly, words barely registering. "We have been trying to establish contact with Washington. No success so far, but I should see how things are going."

He turns and walks off. And there is a distance and a hollowness in Adrian's eyes then, and it makes Dan's stomach twist in ways that have nothing to do with the fact he hasn't eaten a meal in two days and he's been staying awake off caffeine pills for the last ten hours or so. And he kind of wants to run after Adrian, grab him by the arm or the shoulders and shake him and demand to know how the hell he plans on fixing _this_, but he doesn't know where the hell he'd even start, and besides, there are more important things to worry about right now than _Adrian_.

So he goes to see Doctor Mayer, instead. He does as he's told.

*

"Why did you come here?" Adrian asks him, later. "You could have flown west. There may well be areas on the coast that weren't touched." Then he shakes his head. "Ridiculous question. You wanted to do whatever you could to help, of course. You always do."

Dan doesn't answer right away, though that's more out of exhaustion than any particular sense of righteousness at this moment, just looks at him sideways. The words are uninflected -- no bitterness there, but no warmth either -- and Adrian's expression is as impenetrable as the gloom outside. It's all practised neutrality, and his eyes are focused somewhere on the opposite wall, like he's barely even in the room at all.

Eventually, Dan shrugs. "Why did you?" he asks.

"What else could I do?" Adrian doesn't wait for an answer, though, just presses his fingertips together, smiles blandly, and excuses himself again, explaining that he still has things to do. He heads purposefully towards the other side of the shelter, and doesn't look back.

Perhaps Dan imagines the trace of bitterness he hears there, and perhaps the strain in Adrian's voice is just a product of the tiredness everyone's feeling. But for a moment, Dan feels like he's on the verge of understanding something.

*

A week later, when Dan does get around to punching him in the face, Adrian just looks relieved.


	3. The Absence of the Sun

3. Prompt: Noon

* * *

It isn't even a real punch.

They're taking a shortcut through one of the shelter's back corridors. Alone, for once-- it's midday by the clocks, not that there's any other way of knowing the time of day in here, and anyone who isn't on duty or unconscious is probably eating lunch. Dan's stomach rumbles. He hopes there'll be something left to eat by the time they get to the mess hall.

Adrian doesn't seem bothered, though. Come to think of it, Dan hasn't actually seen Adrian stop to sit down and eat since he got here. Or sleep, either, though he must be exhausted, they're _all_ exhausted. Who could really rest in a place like this, crowded with the dispossessed and the desperate and the dying, not even knowing whether there's a world out there anymore, whether there's anything left worth waking up for in the morning?

Dan's actually started to get used to the tiredness. It's a gray constant, with him even in the middle of the day, pressing down upon the center of his head and fading his thoughts out before they're finished.

But since the survivors have been cleaned up and bandaged, all Adrian seems to have done is run around giving instructions (not _orders_, even now he wouldn't be that unsubtle, but people seem to obey unquestioningly anyway) and telling people they need to start working out what to do next-- as though there is going to be a future, as though he knows, as though he has any _right_.

He's doing it right now, in fact, talking smoothly about Archie's capacity, the likely physical and mental state of any survivors, and how best to transport them back to the shelter.

And suddenly Dan can't stand it any more. He stops, dead.

"Will you please shut up?" he says.

It comes out flat and weary, and Adrian actually has the gall to look offended, eyes wide and lips compressed, as though he's holding in a retort. But only briefly. Then his features compose themselves into something that looks like sympathy, and that's a hundred times worse.

"Dan," he says, gently, "I hardly think--"

Dan doesn't even put any thought into it. He strikes out blindly. There's nothing in the way of power or technique there, just anger bursting out like uncorked steam, and there isn't even the satisfaction of a real crack when the punch connects. But Adrian staggers back anyway, sags against the corridor wall and makes no effort to push himself back upright.

For a second, Dan still feels like he's being patronized.

"What would you have me do?" Adrian says, then. "Give up?" His voice is still low and steady, but there's no pity there now, only sadness and-- something else. Relief?

"Just--" Dan trails off. Just what? Admit you were wrong? Say sorry? It all sounds so pathetic, given even a moment's thought. Apologies aren't going to change what's already happened, aren't going to rebuild the city, aren't going to bring back any of the people he's seen choke to death on their own blood out in the infirmary, or any of the ones who died before them, vaporized in a blinding instant last November.

Adrian's still looking at him. _At_ him, not through him like he has been for the past three days.

"I haven't forgotten," he says, very softly. And for a minute he does look tired, helpless and sort of faded, like somebody in a sepia photograph.

Dan just nods, feeling small and petty and stupid all of a sudden, not even managing to be pissed that Adrian can still do that to him.

"Come on," he says, and holds out his hand.

*

Adrian does go to bed, that night. Or, rather, plucks a blanket and a cushion off the communal pile and arranges them on the patch of floor beside Dan's in the makeshift sleeping-quarters.

Sometime shortly after midnight, Dan looks over at him. In this night that is no longer just the absence of the sun, his eyes are bright with tears.


	4. The Furniture of Home

4. Prompt: Afternoon

* * *

There are more bodies than survivors, but that isn't the worst thing.

There are hills of rubble in which it's clear nothing could possibly have survived. There are crumpled, unmoving heaps at the sides of what used to be streets at which Dan tries not to look too closely. But those aren't the worst things, either.

The hardest thing to look at, he's learning, isn't the evidence of death, but the evidence that people did survive. Just for a little while. A few hours, a few days, locked in basements or tucked into under-stairs cupboards with hoarded cans and jars and bottled water and duct tape pressed hastily around the edges of the doors, as though it could keep the apocalypse out. A portable radio with flat batteries; a bucket in the corner, the contents of which make Dan glad he can't smell anything through the protective suit he's wearing; an upturned box, and on top of it a half-empty can of soup and a child's coloring book, open to a half-filled-in picture of Mickey Mouse.

The crayon doesn't stop abruptly, just fades off in a kind of lethargic scribble, like the kid just gave up slowly and quietly, realizing nobody was ever again going to care that he'd managed to keep inside the lines. The debris of the afternoon after the bomb, or the one after that, confined and scratching around for distractions, hope draining away as another hour passed and help didn't come.

There's no-one left in this basement, though, dead or alive. Deserted.

Not all of them are. Dan thinks that's easier, though. Bodies are just... bodies. You get used to them, once you've seen a few. You learn to start seeing them as objects, to just step over them and get on with the job. This way, though, he finds himself wondering about the people who were there, before -- the families, mom and dad and kids dragged out of bed in their pyjamas, the late-night drinkers back from an evening on the town, still dolled-up in the glittering scraps of their clubbing gear, the insomniacs like him, interrupted in the middle of their loneliness, finally given a good excuse for their inability to sleep.

Dan starts to turn the page of the coloring book, hesitates, lets it fall back open on the unfinished picture. He shuts the door carefully behind him.

He catches up with Adrian a half-hour or so later. It's another basement. The owner, Dan guesses, must have been the dead guy he nearly tripped over outside, wrapped in a tape-and-bin-liner attempt at a biosuit, driven outside by some impulse that might have been hunger or hope or despair, or something else entirely, something Dan has no hope of ever understanding.

The place looks deserted, at first. It's a moment before Dan's eyes adjust to the thickness of the dark, and it's only then that he makes out Adrian, kneeling in a corner, looking down at something.

It's a framed painting -- an insipid watercolor landscape, a little amateurish, all done in greens and faded gray-blues.

"Strange." Adrian's voice is toneless, and the pause before he continues is so long that Dan can't be sure he isn't just talking to himself. "The human impulse toward beauty is a strong one. It survives, even in only in mutilated form. To preserve a representation of the natural world, knowing that one will never experience the real thing again-- never even feel the wind upon one's face-- "

He trails off, and Dan isn't even sure whether he's making a point, or just musing aloud, or stringing thoughts together because to leave these places unremarked-upon would be too inhuman.

But later, when he's set Archie's course for the shelter, Dan just places his hand on Adrian's shoulder, hoping that _something_ -- sympathy or understanding, or just the plain solidity of touch -- will get through.

Adrian's half-smile is brief and unfathomable, like he's barely even noticed. Dan stays there, anyway.


	5. After The Rains Have Stopped

Week 5 (Prompt: Night)

* * *

It's been a week since they found anyone alive. They'll have to give up soon, at the end of today, or tomorrow, or the week. It isn't safe for them to keep coming out here like this. The few buildings left standing are unstable, and who knows what's in the dust and the air? Who knows if there's even a _point_? There's precious little fuel left for Archie, and there has been no word from Washington, no radio contact from anywhere at all. Maybe there isn't anybody left out there. Maybe they're just postponing death by weeks or months; maybe they'll be stuck here, permanently, eking out dwindling food and medical supplies until they fade away one by one.

The last guy wasn't long for this world, in any case. His eyes never focused in on anybody, not really. He never seemed to register that he'd been rescued, and he expired in the sickbay a couple of hours after they got him back to the shelter, coughing up something thick and grey.

Dan couldn't watch. Adrian stayed by the guy's side the whole time, though, talking to him in a voice just low enough to be inaudible to anybody else. It sounded soothing, except that Adrian's eyes were dull with exhaustion, and it was hours before Dan could persuade him to go and get some sleep.

"What did you say to him?" Dan asked, later.

Adrian just closed his eyes. "I lied."

It's beginning to get dark. Dan figures they probably ought to call it a day. He picks his way out of the mess of rubble that used to be the last house on this street, and towards the half-collapsed church over the road. He can just make out Adrian, standing in its shadow, pale and still. They should catch up with the others and get back to the shelter; there's little more they can do in this failing light.

There's a sound, then, a groaning that can feel in his breastbone, that's so profound and fathomless it could be coming right from the centre of the earth. Only it isn't. It's coming from above them, and oh fuck, oh _fuck_, it's a piece of balcony or stairway or something, and it's falling, and Dan tries to shout a warning but his voice is too slow and his stupid legs are too slow and there's no way he's going to get there quickly enough--

Adrian doesn't even step back. He just looks up. (And Dan is not quite sure whether or not he really did see it too late, and in the scant scraps of time that are suddenly all that is left to them he never can quite bring himself to ask.) He is standing with hands folded in front of him. He looks like he is praying.

*

It's hard to judge time in the shelter, but Dan is learning a new method now. He measures it in electronic beeps and shallow breaths, the steady click of Doctor Mayer's footsteps round the sickbay, the sidelong, sympathetic glance she shoots him, on the hour, every hour.

Adrian's hand feels reassuringly solid and warm in his own. That seems deeply unfair.

He does wake up, a couple of times. It's late -- past midnight -- and quiet, the first time, and it takes Dan a moment to realize he is being watched steadily.

"Any news?" he whispers.

Dan blinks, horrified -- because how is he supposed to say, _they can't fix you_? -- but a second later he realizes that isn't what Adrian's asking. He just wants to know whether they've had any contact, whether help is coming, like always. Typical. The guy's dying (oh God he's dying) and he still can't bear not to know what's going on. Dan shakes his head, mutely. They don't say anything else.

The next time, though, Dan swallows and forces a smile. "Guess what?" he says. "We heard something. There are some survivors on the West coast. With transport. Help's coming. It's gonna be okay." It comes out too bright and too strained, and once Adrian would have just given him one of his _oh, please_ looks, but now he just smiles softly and closes his eyes.

And when Dan does hear a voice over the radio, three weeks later, all he can manage to feel is grateful. Not because they have a chance now, not because some of them might even survive-- but because at least he wasn't lying.


End file.
